Complicite Theatre’s The Encounter co-directed and performed by Simon McBurney was briefly made available online last month for audiences world over. The play premiered in 2015 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was inspired by Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming (1991) that details National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre’s ‘encounter’ sometime in the 1960s with the Mayoruna tribe in the Amazon Javari Valley.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the play itself is how McBurney and his team of sound designers, Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin create an audio scape that transports its audience to the interior of the Amazon rainforests. The one hundred and thirty two minute play is experienced through headphones even in the live performance, with some dialogues of the performance recorded beforehand and some performed real time.
This, Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes in a review of the play, is ‘a blurring that allows Mr Mc Burney to conduct very immediate – feeling conversations with his past selves.’ Now, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the world since March this year has been attempting to have conversations with the supposedly ‘pre – pandemic’ past, a world that many of us assume we won’t be returning to. What McBurney’s play manages to do is not only bring in the concept of parallel voices, past and present together but also introduce voices of tribal communities that have been absent from mainstream debates concerning the environment and the state of the planet thus far. McBurney does this through the character of Loren McIntyre and his
experiences at the Amazon rainforests.
The play opens with McBurney playing himself and a recorded voice of his daughter asking for a bedtime story. The stage is rather spartan – there is a desk at the centre and a couple of mikes on stage right and McBurney’s narration primarily takes place between these two spaces on the stage. From the scene in his house, the play shifts to McIntyre following the Mayoruna tribe to the heart of the jungle for photographs of them and soon, he finds out that he has lost his way. The play then proceeds to shift between McIntyre’s experiences and interruptions from McBurney’s daughter and other voices that talk about memory, imagination and conscience. As most reviews of the play have pointed out, as a viewer and listener, one does begin to find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and fictional, what portion of it is memory and what part is imagination? These of course depend on the viewer and I will not even attempt to answer these questions for I won’t be able to do the play, McBurney or the Mayoruna justice. What is however, worth examining is these ideas outside of the context of the play.
Post the play, McBurney engages in a ‘Q and A’ session with Paul Heritage where the former brings to light the real questions one should perhaps engage in after watching the play and more importantly perhaps, in this juncture that humanity currently finds itself in. Since the idea of ‘consciousness’ is at the core of the play, McBurney dedicates a large chunk of the ‘Q and A’ into this particular idea and how in the making of The Encounter his idea of consciousness changed. He says that most people while locating the site of consciousness in their body will often point to either the head or heart – there maybe exceptions of course but the common notion is that consciousness dwells within us. When he posed the same question the people of the Mayoruna tribe, they pointed to the outside, implying that external is a reflection of the internal i.e. their notions of the interior and the exterior flow into each other unlike the capitalist world today where, M cBurney says, the idea of the binary prevails, giving rise to compartmentalization.
This has largely been the approach to the ‘new normal’ as well. Dividing this moment into the pre pandemic, pandemic and post pandemic era is making us look at the future in isolation to the past and the present that have shaped it and continue to shape it. Perhaps the real lesson in McBurney’s play is to take this moment to look at this moment not as a pause, but instead in continuum with man’s incessant disruption of the homeostasis, of our economics that have long forgotten the natural world and the protectors of the natural world, of policies that have never existed for the marginalized and of language that has lent the view that the world is nature vs nurture, man vs wild, natural vs man made.
– Laya Kumar
